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22 years ago.
We were stocking and getting ready to open for the business day when our manager turned up the news on the TV display wall in the back of the store and yelled "you guys have to see this."
The first tower was on fire, and as we all watched and wondered what terrible coincidence made a plane accidentally hit an easily avoidable building, the second one slammed into tower 2.
Needless to say, we got no work done that day, and no customers who came in did any shopping. We all stood paralyzed as the towers continued to burn and eventually collapsed in ruin. Everybody was transfixed by the video wall for the next several hours, and it remained that way for several days.
I got several calls from the Navy asking me if I wanted to rejoin, and I was forced to remind them that because of my spine injury and the hardware implants, I could no longer work with the reactors or ionizing radiation. I said Iโd return as an instructor, but what was needed were deployment ready people, so I stayed home while the world c descended into chaos.
What stuck with me during the days and weeks that followed was the extreme tension and, strangely enough, the quiet. I would take my dog to the dogpark and there was a silence from the skies; no contrails, no airliners. I thought it might be the very last time in history that the skies would be completely clear of any aircraft, and that my children, and even their children, would probably never get to experience this eerily peaceful quiet again.
I remember going to karaoke, and nearly every night the most applause and tearful cheers were for the patriotic songs; "America," "God Bless the USA," and many others brought the house down, and were sung without irony just because the people singing and those listening truly felt the patriotism and love of their fellow man to their core.
We MUST, as a country, keep the memory and the feeling of this horrible event alive. Even though the scope of this tragedy is far less than the horrific actions of the Nazis during World War II, we must never forget what happened, why it happened, how it made us feel and how the world was changed forever through the actions of a few evil and determined individuals.
Our children and those who were very young when 9/11 happened will not have the same viewpoint as do those who were adults during that horrible time.
They will read about it in history books, see the memorial TV specials and roll their eyes when their elders explain yet again why our military fought and died in a war halfway around the world against an enemy that is not concrete and knowable, but instead a nebulous theology.
Just as there are those who deny the massacre of 1.5 million Armenians by Turkey during the period of 1915-1917, and those who disbelieve the Holocaust of World War II which claimed the lives of over 6 million souls during the period of 1933-1945, someday the memories of 9/11 will be debated and even denied by those who weren't there to experience it.
"All that is required for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing." - Edmund Burke
Remember those who we've lost, those who loved them and those who fight for our freedoms and safety, helping to insure a tragedy of this magnitude never happens again.
"Those who forget the past are bound to repeat it." - Winston Churchill
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